The 12 Labors of a genealogist – #10 – Organize your research

When you start to have several hundred people in your genealogy, it’s not uncommon to lose track of the progress of research for each member of the various family branches.

Since the information you’re looking for isn’t always immediately available, it’s not uncommon to move on to another person and then come back to complete your genealogy when you finally get the information you’re looking for.

Apart from the fact that this approach is time-consuming, the result is a genealogy with a lot of missing information, which often hinders further research and the reliability of the information… In fact, as indicated in a previous article, it is desirable to have at least two sources to confirm a piece of information.

How do you find visibility and know what to look for?

It’s not easy to keep track of the progress of your work.

You can print out your family tree, for example, and it will show the surnames, first names and dates of birth and death of each individual. But, even when printed on large-format paper, it’s not easy to see if you still have information or people to research to complete a family branch.

You can also use lists or tables showing information on key events (birth, marriage(s) and death), but these only partially meet your needs.

Manually compiling a list of missing information will be time-consuming. And this work will have to be repeated regularly to take into account the progress of your research.

Ideally, therefore, you should have a list of missing or unsourced information, organized by person and updated as your research progresses.

Organize the list of research to be carried out on the basis of the progress achieved for each individual.

To continue your research efficiently, you’ll first need to choose a search method:

– You can choose an individual in the genealogy and establish your next research by progressively going up his family tree, generation after generation, until a period when it becomes very difficult to find records…

– You can do the same by going down the tree through the individual’s descendants, then the descendants of those descendants, and so on, until you reach the contemporaries for whom it becomes impossible to obtain information other than directly from the people (because of the laws).

These first two methods are called progressive (through ascendants or descendants). They offer the advantage of logically advancing your research by generation.

There is, however, an alternative to these two progressive methods: following a so-called opportunistic method. In this approach, each piece of information discovered is taken into account without delay , and the list of future searches is updated accordingly. For example, a birth certificate may reveal a sibling. The genealogist may decide to suspend current research for the time being and search for a marriage record concerning this new person (as the records of the commune of birth are consulted). Then they can resume their research.

This opportunistic method reduces the number of times records are consulted in a given location, and greatly simplifies data verification (as families are more easily constructed). But this method has one major drawback: it can cause genealogists to lose control of their research by changing their focus.

Discover Genealogical Data Analysis, the ideal tool to boost your genealogical research!

Instead of doing the work manually, take advantage of the power of Genealogical Data Analysis.

Our application quickly identifies missing information, or information for which you haven’t provided a source.

Genealogical Data Analysis then uses the search method of your choice (progressive or opportunistic) and presents the information in an optimized order. Genealogical Data Analysis builds lists sorted by person or location of the information to be searched.

Finally, Genealogical Data Analysis also helps you by suggesting ways to find missing data and sources to check, and by organizing searches to help you waste as little time as possible.